Tag Archives: data security

Public bodies worldwide are making a wealth of information available, and encouraging its commercial exploitation. This sounds like a bonanza for the private sector at the public expense, but entrepreneurs are holding back. A healthy market for products and services that use public-sector information would provide real benefits for everyone. What can we do to bring it about?

Why Governments Give Away Data

The EU directive of 2003 on the reuse of public sector information encourages the Member States to make as much information available for reuse as possible. This directive was revised and strengthened in 2013. The U.S. Open Government Directive of 2009 provides similar encouragement, requiring US government agencies to post at least three high-value data sets online and register them on its data.gov portal. Other countries have taken similar measures to make public data publicly available.

Why are governments doing this? There are two main reasons.

One is that it improves the societies that they serve and the governments themselves. Free availability of information about society and government makes people more effective citizens and makes government more efficient. It illuminates discussion of civic issues, and points a searchlight at corruption.

The second reason is that it has a positive effect on the wealth of nations and their citizens. The EU directive highlights the ability of European companies to exploit the potential of public-sector information, and contribute to economic growth and job creation. Information is not just the currency of democracy. It is also the lubricant of a successful economy.

Success Stories

There are some big success stories.

If you drive a car, you probably use satellite navigation to find your way about, and this may use public-sector information. In the UK, for example, map data that can be used by sat-nav systems is supplied for commercial use by a government agency, the Ordnance Survey.

When you order something over the web for delivery to your house, you often enter a postal code and see most of the address auto-completed by the website. Postcode databases are maintained by national postal authorities, which are generally either government departments or regulated private corporations, and made available by them for commercial use. Here, the information is not directly supporting a market, but is contributing to the sale of a range of unrelated products and services.

The data may not be free. There are commercial arrangements for supply of map and postcode data. But it is available, and is the basis for profitable products and for features that make products more competitive.

The Bonanza that Isn’t

These successes are, so far, few in number. The economic benefits of open government data could be huge. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates a potential of between 3 and 5 trillion dollars annually. Yet the direct impact of Open Data on the EU economy in 2010, seven years after the directive was issued, is estimated by Capgemini at only about 1% of that, although the EU accounts for nearly a quarter of world GDP.

The business benefits to be gained from using map and postcode data are obvious. There are other kinds of public sector data, where the business benefits may be substantial, but they are not easy to see. For example, data is or could be available about public transport schedules and availability, about population densities, characteristics and trends, and about real estate and land use. These are all areas that support substantial business activity, but businesses in these areas seldom make use of public sector information today.

Where are the Products?

Why are entrepreneurs not creating these potentially profitable products and services? There is one obvious reason. The data they are interested in is not always available and, where it is available, it is provided in different ways, and comes in different formats. Instead of a single large market, the entrepreneur sees a number of small markets, none of which is worth tackling. For example, the market for an application that plans public transport journeys across a single town is not big enough to justify substantial investment in product development. An application that could plan journeys across any town in Europe would certainly be worthwhile, but is not possible unless all the towns make this data available in a common format.

Public sector information providers often do not know what value their data has, or understand its applications. Working within tight budgets, they cannot afford to spend large amounts of effort on assembling and publishing data that will not be used. They follow the directives but, without common guidelines, they simply publish whatever is readily to hand, in whatever form it happens to be.

The data that could support viable products is not available everywhere and, where it is available, it comes in different formats. (One that is often used is PDF, which is particularly difficult to process as an information source.) The result is that the cost of product development is high, and the expected return is low.

Where is the Market?

There is a second reason why entrepreneurs hesitate. The shape of the market is unclear. In a mature market, everyone knows who the key players are, understands their motivations, and can predict to some extent how they will behave. The market for products and services based on public sector information is still taking shape. No one is even sure what kinds of organization will take part, or what they will do. How far, for example, will public-sector bodies go in providing free applications? Can large corporations buy future dominance with loss-leader products? Will some unknown company become an overnight success, like Facebook? With these unknowns, the risks are very high.

Finding the Answers

Public sector information providers and standards bodies are tackling these problems. The Open Group participates in SHARE-PSI, the European network for the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing open data policies in the public sector. The experience gained by SHARE-PSI will be used by the World-Wide Web Consortium as a basis for standards and guidelines for publication of public sector information. These standards and guidelines may be used, not just by the public sector, but by not-for-profit bodies and even commercial corporations, many of which have information that they want to make freely available.

The Open Group is making a key contribution by helping to map the shape of the market. It is using the Business Scenario technique from its well-known Enterprise Architecture methodology TOGAF® to identify the kinds of organization that will take part, and their objectives and concerns.

There will be a preview of this on October 22 at The Open Group event in London which will feature a workshop session on Open Public Sector Data. This workshop will look at how Open Data can help business, present a draft of the Business Scenario, and take input from participants to help develop its conclusions.

The developed Business Scenario will be presented at the SHARE-PSI workshop in Lisbon on December 3-4. The theme of this workshop is encouraging open data usage by commercial developers. It will bring a wide variety of stakeholders together to discuss and build the relationship between the public and private sectors. It will also address, through collaboration with the EU LAPSI project, the legal framework for use of open public sector data.

Benefit from Participation!

If you are thinking about publishing or using public-sector data, you can benefit from these workshops by gaining an insight into the way that the market is developing. In the long term, you can influence the common standards and guidelines that are being developed. In the short term, you can find out what is happening and network with others who are interested.

The social and commercial benefits of open public-sector data are not being realized today. They can be realized through a healthy market in products and services that process the data and make it useful to citizens. That market will emerge when public bodies and businesses clearly understand the roles that they can play. Now is the time to develop that understanding and begin to profit from it.

Dr. Chris Harding is Director for Interoperability at The Open Group. He has been with The Open Group for more than ten years, and is currently responsible for managing and supporting its work on interoperability, including SOA and interoperability aspects of Cloud Computing, and the Open Platform 3.0™ Forum. He is a member of the BCS, the IEEE and the AEA, and is a certified TOGAF® practitioner.

By Jim Hietala, VP, Security and Andrew Josey, Director of Standards, The Open Group

This is the first in a four-part series of blogs introducing the Open FAIR Body of Knowledge. In this first blog. we look at what the Open FAIR Body of Knowledge provides, and why a taxonomy is needed for Risk Analysis.

An Introduction to Risk Analysis and the Open FAIR Body of Knowledge

The Open FAIR Body of Knowledge provides a taxonomy and method for understanding, analyzing and measuring information risk. It allows organizations to:

Speak in one language concerning their risk using the standard taxonomy and terminology, and communicate risk effectively to senior management

Consistently study and apply risk analysis principles to any object or asset

View organizational risk in total

Challenge and defend risk decisions

Compare risk mitigation options

What does FAIR stand for?

FAIR is an acronym for Factor Analysis of Information Risk.

Risk Analysis: The Need for an Accurate Model and Taxonomy

Organizations seeking to analyze and manage risk encounter some common challenges. Put simply, it is difficult to make sense of risk without having a common understanding of both the factors that (taken together) contribute to risk, and the relationships between those factors. The Open FAIR Body of Knowledge provides such a taxonomy.

Here’s an example that will help to illustrate why a standard taxonomy is important. Let’s assume that you are an information security risk analyst tasked with determining how much risk your company is exposed to from a “lost or stolen laptop” scenario. The degree of risk that the organization experiences in such a scenario will vary widely depending on a number of key factors. To even start to approach an analysis of the risk posed by this scenario to your organization, you will need to answer a number of questions, such as:

Whose laptop is this?

What data resides on this laptop?

How and where did the laptop get lost or stolen?

What security measures were in place to protect the data on the laptop?

How strong were the security controls?

The level of risk to your organization will vary widely based upon the answers to these questions. The degree of overall organizational risk posed by lost laptops must also include an estimation of the frequency of occurrence of lost or stolen laptops across the organization.

In one extreme, suppose the laptop belonged to your CTO, who had IP stored on it in the form of engineering plans for a revolutionary product in a significant new market. If the laptop was unprotected in terms of security controls, and it was stolen while he was on a business trip to a country known for state-sponsored hacking and IP theft, then there is likely to be significant risk to your organization. On the other extreme, suppose the laptop belonged to a junior salesperson a few days into their job, it contained no customer or prospect lists, and it was lost at a security checkpoint at an airport. In this scenario, there’s likely to be much less risk. Or consider a laptop which is used by the head of sales for the organization, who has downloaded Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on customers from the CRM system in order to do sales analysis, and has his or her laptop stolen. In this case, there could be Primary Loss to the organization, and there might also be Secondary Losses associated with reactions by the individuals whose data is compromised.

The Open FAIR Body of Knowledge is designed to help you to ask the right questions to determine the asset at risk (is it the laptop itself, or the data?), the magnitude of loss, the skill level and motivations of the attacker, the resistance strength of any security controls in place, the frequency of occurrence of the threat and of an actual loss event, and other factors that contribute to the overall level of risk for any specific risk scenario.

In our next blog in this series, we will consider 5 reasons why you should use The Open FAIR Body of Knowledge for Risk Analysis.

The Open FAIR Body of Knowledge consists of the following Open Group standards:

Our other publications include a Pocket Guide and a Certification Study Guide.

Jim Hietala, CISSP, GSEC, is the Vice President, Security for The Open Group, where he manages all IT Security, Risk Management and Healthcare programs and standards activities. He participates in the SANS Analyst/Expert program and has also published numerous articles on Information Security, Risk Management, and compliance topics in publications including The ISSA Journal, Bank Accounting & Finance, Risk Factor, SC Magazine, and others.

Andrew Josey is Director of Standards within The Open Group. He is currently managing the standards process for The Open Group, and has recently led the standards development projects for TOGAF® 9.1, ArchiMate® 2.0, IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (POSIX), and the core specifications of the Single UNIX® Specification, Version 4. Previously, he has led the development and operation of many of The Open Group certification development projects, including industry-wide certification programs for the UNIX system, the Linux Standard Base, TOGAF, and IEEE POSIX. He is a member of the IEEE, USENIX, UKUUG, and the Association of Enterprise Architects.

One area of special interest is the Healthcare arena, and Boston is a hotbed of innovation and adaption for how technology, Enterprise Architecture, and standards can improve the communication and collaboration among Healthcare ecosystem players.

And so, we’re joined by a new Forum Director at The Open Group to learn how an expected continued deluge of data and information about patients, providers, outcomes, and efficiencies is pushing the Healthcare industry to rapid change.

Gardner: Great to have you. I’m looking forward to the Boston conference and want to remind our listeners and readers that it’s not too late to sign up. You can learn more at http://www.opengroup.org.

Jason, let’s start by talking about the relationship between Boundaryless Information Flow, which is a major theme of the conference, and healthcare. Healthcare perhaps is the killer application for Boundaryless Information Flow.

Lee: Interesting, I haven’t heard it referred to that way, but healthcare is 17 percent of the US economy. It’s upwards of $3 trillion. The costs of healthcare are a problem, not just in the United States, but all over the world, and there are a great number of inefficiencies in the way we practice healthcare.

We don’t necessarily intend to be inefficient, but there are so many places and people involved in healthcare, it’s very difficult to get them to speak the same language. It’s almost as if you’re in a large house with lots of different rooms, and every room you walk into they speak a different language. To get information to flow from one room to the other requires some active efforts and that’s what we’re undertaking here at The Open Group.

Gardner: What is it about the current collaboration approaches that don’t work? Obviously, healthcare has been around for a long time and there have been different players involved. What’s the hurdle? What prevents a nice, seamless, easy flow and collaboration in information that gets better outcomes? What’s the holdup?

Lee: There are many ways to answer that question, because there are many barriers. Perhaps the simplest is the transformation of healthcare from a paper-based industry to a digital industry. Everyone has walked into an office, looked behind the people at the front desk, and seen file upon file and row upon row of folders, information that’s kept in a written format.

When there’s been movement toward digitizing that information, not everyone has used the same system. It’s almost like trains running on a different gauge track. Obviously if the track going east to west is a different gauge than going north to south, then trains aren’t going to be able to travel on those same tracks. In the same way, healthcare information does not flow easily from one office to another or from one provider to another.

Gardner: So not only do we have disparate strategies for collecting and communicating health data, but we’re also seeing much larger amounts of data coming from a variety of new and different places. Some of them now even involve sensors inside of patients themselves or devices that people will wear. So is the data deluge, the volume, also an issue here?

Lee: Certainly. I heard recently that an integrated health plan, which has multiple hospitals involved, contains more elements of data than the Library of Congress. As information is collected at multiple points in time, over a relatively short period of time, you really do have a data deluge. Figuring out how to find your way through all the data and look at the most relevant for the patient is a great challenge.

Gardner: I suppose the bad news is that there is this deluge of data, but it’s also good news, because more data means more opportunity for analysis, a better ability to predict and determine best practices, and also provide overall lower costs with better patient care.

So it seems like the stakes are rather high here to get this right, to not just crumble under a volume or an avalanche of data, but to master it, because it’s perhaps the future. The solution is somewhere in there too.

Lee: No question about it. At The Open Group, our focus is on solutions. We, like others, put a great deal of effort into describing the problems, but figuring out how to bring IT technologies to bear on business problems, how to encourage different parts of organizations to speak to one another and across organizations to speak the same language, and to operate using common standards and language. That’s really what we’re all about.

And it is, in a large sense, part of the process of helping to bring healthcare into the 21st Century. A number of industries are a couple of decades ahead of healthcare in the way they use large datasets — big data, some people refer to it as. I’m talking about companies like big department stores and large online retailers. They really have stepped up to the plate and are using that deluge of data in ways that are very beneficial to them, and healthcare can do the same. We’re just not quite at the same level of evolution.

Gardner: And to your point, the stakes are so much higher. Retail is, of course, a big deal in the economy, but as you pointed out, healthcare is such a much larger segment and portion. So just making modest improvements in communication, collaboration, or data analysis can reap huge rewards.

Lee: Absolutely true. There is the cost side of things, but there is also the quality side. So there are many ways in which healthcare can improve through standardization and coordinated development, using modern technology that cannot just reduce cost, but improve quality at the same time.

Gardner: I’d like to get into a few of the hotter trends, but before we do, it seems that The Open Group has recognized the importance here by devoting the entire second day of their conference in Boston, that will be on July 22, to Healthcare.

Maybe you could give us a brief overview of what participants, and even those who come in online and view recorded sessions of the conference at http://new.livestream.com/opengroup should expect? What’s going to go on July 22nd?

Lee: We have a packed day. We’re very excited to have Dr. Joe Kvedar, a physician at Partners HealthCare and Founding Director of the Center for Connected Health, as our first plenary speaker. The title of his presentation is “Making Health Additive.” Dr. Kvedar is a widely respected expert on mobile health, which is currently the Healthcare Forum’s top work priority. As mobile medical devices become ever more available and diversified, they will enable consumers to know more about their own health and wellness. A great deal of data of potentially useful health data will be generated. How this information can be used–not just by consumers but also by the healthcare establishment that takes care of them as patients, will become a question of increasing importance. It will become an area where standards development and The Open Group can be very helpful.

Our second plenary speaker, Proteus Duxbury, Chief Technology Officer at Connect for Health Colorado,will discuss a major feature of the Affordable Care Act—the health insurance exchanges–which are designed to bring health insurance to tens of millions of people who previously did not have access to it. Mr. Duxbury is going to talk about how Enterprise Architecture–which is really about getting to solutions by helping the IT folks talk to the business folks and vice versa–has helped the State of Colorado develop their Health Insurance Exchange.

After the plenaries, we will break up into 3 tracks, one of which is Healthcare-focused. In this track there will be three presentations, all of which discuss how Enterprise Architecture and the approach to Boundaryless Information Flow can help healthcare and healthcare decision-makers become more effective and efficient.

One presentation will focus on the transformation of care delivery at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. Another will address stewarding healthcare transformation using Enterprise Architecture, focusing on one of our Platinum members, Oracle, and a company called Intelligent Medical Objects, and how they’re working together in a productive way, bringing IT and healthcare decision-making together.

Then, the final presentation in this track will focus on the development of an Enterprise Architecture-based solution at an insurance company. The payers, or the insurers–the big companies that are responsible for paying bills and collecting premiums–have a very important role in the healthcare system that extends beyond administration of benefits. Yet, payers are not always recognized for their key responsibilities and capabilities in the area of clinical improvements and cost improvements.

With the increase in payer data brought on in large part by the adoption of a new coding system–the ICD-10–which will come online this year, there will be a huge amount of additional data, including clinical data, that become available. At The Open Group, we consider payers—health insurance companies (some of which are integrated with providers)–as very important stakeholders in the big picture..

In the afternoon, we’re going to switch gears a bit and have a speaker talk about the challenges, the barriers, the “pain points” in introducing new technology into the healthcare systems. The focus will return to remote or mobile medical devices and the predictable but challenging barriers to getting newly generated health information to flow to doctors’ offices and into patients records, electronic health records, and hospitals data keeping and data sharing systems.

We’ll have a panel of experts that responds to these pain points, these challenges, and then we’ll draw heavily from the audience, who we believe will be very, very helpful, because they bring a great deal of expertise in guiding us in our work. So we’re very much looking forward to the afternoon as well.

Gardner: It’s really interesting. A couple of these different plenaries and discussions in the afternoon come back to this user-generated data. Jason, we really seem to be on the cusp of a whole new level of information that people will be able to develop from themselves through their lifestyle, new devices that are connected.

We hear from folks like Apple, Samsung, Google, and Microsoft. They’re all pulling together information and making it easier for people to not only monitor their exercise, but their diet, and maybe even start to use sensors to keep track of blood sugar levels, for example.

In fact, a new Flurry Analytics survey showed 62 percent increase in the use of health and fitness application over the last six months on the popular mobile devices. This compares to a 33 percent increase in other applications in general. So there’s an 87 percent faster uptick in the use of health and fitness applications.

Tell me a little bit how you see this factoring in. Is this a mixed blessing? Will so much data generated from people in addition to the electronic medical records, for example, be a bad thing? Is this going to be a garbage in, garbage out, or is this something that could potentially be a game-changer in terms of how people react to their own data and then bring more data into the interactions they have with care providers?

Lee: It’s always a challenge to predict what the market is going to do, but I think that’s a remarkable statistic that you cited. My prediction is that the increased volume of person- generated data from mobile health devices is going to be a game-changer. This view also reflects how the Healthcare Forum members (which includes members from Capgemini, Philips, IBM, Oracle and HP) view the future.

The commercial demand for mobile medical devices, things that can be worn, embedded, or swallowed, as in pills, as you mentioned, is growing ever more. The software and the applications that will be developed to be used with the devices is going to grow by leaps and bounds. As you say, there are big players getting involved. Already some of the pedometer type devices that measure the number of steps taken in a day have captured the interest of many, many people. Even David Sedaris, serious guy that he is, was writing about it recently in ‘The New Yorker’.

What we will find is that many of the health indicators that we used to have to go to the doctor or nurse or lab to get information on will become available to us through these remote devices.

There will be a question, of course, as to reliability and validity of the information, to your point about garbage in, garbage out, but I think standards development will help here This, again, is where The Open Group comes in. We might also see the FDA exercising its role in ensuring safety here, as well as other organizations, in determining which devices are reliable.

The Open Group is working in the area of mobile data and information systems that are developed around them, and their ability to (a) talk to one another and (b) talk to the data devices/infrastructure used in doctors’ offices and in hospitals. This is called interoperability and it’s certainly lacking in the country.

There are already problems around interoperability and connectivity of information in the healthcare establishment as it is now. When patients and consumers start collecting their own data, and the patient is put at the center of the nexus of healthcare, then the question becomes how does that information that patients collect get back to the doctor/clinician in ways in which the data can be trusted and where the data are helpful?

After all, if a patient is wearing a medical device, there is the opportunity to collect data, about blood sugar level let’s say, throughout the day. And this is really taking healthcare outside of the four walls of the clinic and bringing information to bear that can be very, very useful to clinicians and beneficial to patients.

In short, the rapid market dynamic in mobile medical devices and in the software and hardware that facilitates interoperability begs for standards-based solutions that reduce costs and improve quality, and all of which puts the patient at the center. This is The Open Group’s Healthcare Forum’s sweet spot.

Gardner: It seems to me a real potential game-changer as well, and that something like Boundaryless Information Flow and standards will play an essential role. Because one of the big question marks with many of the ailments in a modern society has to do with lifestyle and behavior.

So often, the providers of the care only really have the patient’s responses to questions, but imagine having a trove of data at their disposal, a 360-degree view of the patient to then further the cause of understanding what’s really going on, on a day-to-day basis.

But then, it’s also having a two-way street, being able to deliver perhaps in an automated fashion reinforcements and incentives, information back to the patient in real-time about behavior and lifestyles. So it strikes me as something quite promising, and I look forward to hearing more about it at the Boston conference.

Any other thoughts on this issue about patient flow of data, not just among and between providers and payers, for example, or providers in an ecosystem of care, but with the patient as the center of it all, as you said?

Lee: As more mobile medical devices come to the market, we’ll find that consumers own multiple types of devices at least some of which collect multiple types of data. So even for the patient, being at the center of their own healthcare information collection, there can be barriers to having one device talk to the other. If a patient wants to keep their own personal health record, there may be difficulties in bringing all that information into one place.

So the interoperability issue, the need for standards, guidelines, and voluntary consensus among stakeholders about how information is represented becomes an issue, not just between patients and their providers, but for individual consumers as well.

Gardner: And also the cloud providers. There will be a variety of large organizations with cloud-modeled services, and they are going to need to be, in some fashion, brought together, so that a complete 360-degree view of the patient is available when needed. It’s going to be an interesting time.

Of course, we’ve also looked at many other industries and tried to have a cloud synergy, a cloud-of-clouds approach to data and also the transaction. So it’s interesting how what’s going on in multiple industries is common, but it strikes me that, again, the scale and the impact of the healthcare industry makes it a leader now, and perhaps a driver for some of these long overdue structured and standardized activities.

Lee: It could become a leader. There is no question about it. Moreover, there is a lot Healthcare can learn from other companies, from mistakes that other companies have made, from lessons they have learned, from best practices they have developed (both on the content and process side). And there are issues, around security in particular, where Healthcare will be at the leading edge in trying to figure out how much is enough, how much is too much, and what kinds of solutions work.

There’s a great future ahead here. It’s not going to be without bumps in the road, but organizations like The Open Group are designed and experienced to help multiple stakeholders come together and have the conversations that they need to have in order to push forward and solve some of these problems.

Gardner: Well, great. I’m sure there will be a lot more about how to actually implement some of those activities at the conference. Again, that’s going to be in Boston, beginning on July 21, 2014.

We’ll have to leave it there. We’re about out of time. We’ve been talking with a new Director at The Open Group to learn how an expected continued deluge of data and information about patients and providers, outcomes and efficiencies are all working together to push the Healthcare industry to rapid change. And, as we’ve heard, that might very well spill over into other industries as well.

So we’ve seen how innovation and adaptation around technology, Enterprise Architecture and standards can improve the communication and collaboration among Healthcare ecosystem players.

It’s not too late to register for The Open Group Boston 2014 (http://www.opengroup.org/boston2014) and join the conversation via Twitter #ogchat #ogBOS, where you will be able to learn more about Boundaryless Information Flow, Open Platform 3.0, Healthcare and other relevant topics.

So a big thank you to our guest. We’ve been joined by Jason Lee, Healthcare and Security Forums Director at The Open Group. Thanks so much, Jason.

By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications, The Open Group

The face of technology is evolving at breakneck speed, driven by demand from consumers and businesses alike for more robust, intuitive and integrated service offerings. APIs (application programming interfaces) have made this possible by offering greater interoperability between otherwise disparate software and hardware systems. While there are clear benefits to their use, how do today’s security and value-conscious enterprises take advantage of this new interoperability without exposing them themselves?

On Wednesday, July 9th at 9:00 am PT/12:00 pm ET/5:00 pm GMT, please join us for a tweet jam that will explore how APIs are changing the face of business today, and how to prepare for their implementation in your enterprise.

APIs are at the heart of how today’s technology communicates with one another, and have been influential in enabling new levels of development for social, mobility and beyond. The business benefits of APIs are endless, as are the opportunities to explore how they can be effectively used and developed.

There is reason to maintain a certain level of caution, however, as recent security issues involving open APIs have impacted overall confidence and sustainability.

This tweet jam will look at the business benefits of APIs, as well as potential vulnerabilities and weak points that you should be wary of when integrating them into your Enterprise Architecture.

We welcome The Open Group members and interested participants from all backgrounds to join the discussion and interact with our panel of thought-leaders from The Open Group including Jason Lee, Healthcare and Security Forums Director; Jim Hietala, Vice President of Security; David Lounsbury, CTO; and Dr. Chris Harding, Director for Interoperability and Open Platform 3.0™ Forum Director. To access the discussion, please follow the hashtag #ogchat during the allotted discussion time.

Interested in joining The Open Group Security Forum? Register your interest, here.

What Is a Tweet Jam?

A tweet jam is a 45 minute “discussion” hosted on Twitter. The purpose of the tweet jam is to share knowledge and answer questions on relevant and thought-provoking issues. Each tweet jam is led by a moderator and a dedicated group of experts to keep the discussion flowing. The public (or anyone using Twitter interested in the topic) is encouraged to join the discussion.

Participation Guidance

Here are some helpful guidelines for taking part in the tweet jam:

Please introduce yourself (name, title and organization)

Use the hashtag #ogchat following each of your tweets

Begin your tweets with the question number to which you are responding

Please refrain from individual product/service promotions – the goal of the tweet jam is to foster an open and informative dialogue

Keep your commentary focused, thoughtful and on-topic

If you have any questions prior to the event or would like to join as a participant, please contact George Morin (@GMorin81 or george.morin@hotwirepr.com).

We look forward to a spirited discussion and hope you will be able to join!

At The Open Group Conference in Sydney in April, the session on “Which information risks are shaping our lives?” by Stephen Singam, Chief Technology Officer, HP Enterprise Security Services, Australia provides great insight on this topic. In this session, Singam analyzes the current and emerging information risks while recommending a proactive approach to address them head-on with adversary-centric solutions.

The 3 steps that enterprises must take to proactively address security concerns are below:

Computing the cost of cyber-crime

The HP Ponemon 2012 Cost of Cyber Crime Study revealed that cyber attacks have more than doubled in a three year period with the financial impact increasing by nearly 40 percent. Here are the key takeaways from this research:

Cyber-crimes continue to be costly. The average annualized cost of cyber-crime for 56 organizations is $8.9 million per year, with a range of $1.4 million to $46 million.

Cyber attacks have become common occurrences. Companies experienced 102 successful attacks per week and 1.8 successful attacks per company per week in 2012.

The most costly cyber-crimes are those caused by denial of service, malicious insiders and web-based attacks.

When computing the cost of cyber-crime, enterprises must address direct, indirect and opportunity costs that result from the loss or theft of information, disruption to business operations, revenue loss and destruction of property, plant and equipment. The following phases of combating cyber-crime must also be factored in to comprehensively determine the total cost:

Detection of patterns of behavior indicating an impending attack through sustained monitoring of the enabling infrastructure

Investigation of the security violation upon occurrence to determine the underlying root cause and take appropriate remedial measures

Incident response to address the immediate situation at hand, communicate the incidence of the attack raise all applicable alerts

Containment of the attack by controlling its proliferation across the enterprise

Recovery from the damages incurred as a result of the attack to ensure ongoing business operations based upon the business continuity plans in place

Identifying proactive steps that can be taken to address cyber-crime

“Better get security right,”says HP Security Strategist Mary Ann Mezzapelle in her keynote on Big Data and Security at The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach. Asserting that proactive risk management is the most effective approach, Mezzapelle challenged enterprises to proactively question the presence of shadow IT, data ownership, usage of security tools and standards while taking a comprehensive approach to security end-to-end within the enterprise.

Andy Ellis discussed managing risk with psychology instead of brute force in his keynote at the 2013 RSA Conference.

At the same conference, in another keynote, world re-knowned game-designer and inventor of SuperBetter, Jane McGonigal suggested the application of the “collective intelligence” that gaming generates can combat security concerns.

In this interview, Bruce Schneier, renowned security guru and author of several books including LIARS & Outliers, suggested “Bad guys are going to invent new stuff — whether we want them to or not.” Should we take a cue from Hollywood and consider the inception of OODA loop into the security hacker’s mind?

The Balancing Act.

Can enterprises afford to take such proactive steps? Or more importantly, can they afford not to?

Enterprises must define their risk management strategy and determine the proactive steps that are best in alignment with their business objectives and information security standards. This will enable organizations to better assess the cost of execution for such measures. While the actual cost is likely to vary by enterprise, inaction is not an acceptable alternative. Like all other critical corporate initiatives, these proactive measures must receive the board-level attention they deserve.

Enterprises must balance the cost of executing such proactive measures against the potential cost of data loss and reputational harm. This will ensure that the right proactive measures are taken with executive support.

How about you? Has your enterprise taken the steps to assess the cost of cybercrime? Have you considered various proactive steps to combat cybercrime? Share your thoughts with me in the comments section below.

HP Distinguished Technologist, E.G.Nadhan has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry across the complete spectrum of selling, delivering and managing enterprise level solutions for HP customers. He is the founding co-chair for The Open Group SOCCI project and is also the founding co-chair for the Open Group Cloud Computing Governance project. Twitter handle @NadhanAtHP.

I have a great job at CA Technologies, I can’t deny it. Working in CA Technologies Federal Certification Program Office, I have the responsibility of knowing what certifications, accreditations, mandates, etc. are relevant and then helping them get implemented.

One of the responsibilities (and benefits) of my job is getting to go to great conferences like the RSA Security Conference which just wrapped last week. This year I was honored to be selected by the Program Committee to speak twice at the event. Both talks fit well to the Policy and Government track at the show.

First I was on a panel with a distinguished group of senior leaders from both industry and government. The title of the session was, Certification of Products or Accreditation of Organizations: Which to Do? The idea was to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of individual product certifications vs. looking at an entire company or business unit. Since I’ve led CA through many product certifications (certs) and have been involved in accreditation programs as well, my position was to be able to bring real-world industry perspective to the panel. The point I tried to make was that product certs (like Common Criteria – CC) add value, but only for the specific purpose that they are designed for (security functions). We’ve seen CC expanding beyond just security enforcing products and that’s concerning. Product certs are expensive, time consuming and take away from time that could be spent on innovation. We want to do CC when it will be long lasting and add value.

On the idea of accreditation of organizations, I first talked about CMMI and my views on its challenges. I then shifted to the Open Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF), a forum of The Open Group, as I’ve written about before and said that the accreditation program that group is building is more focused than CMMI. OTTF is building something that – when adopted by industry and THEIR suppliers – will provide assurance that technology is being built the right way (best practices) and will give acquirers confidence that products bought from vendors that have the OTTF mark can be trusted. The overall conclusion of the panel was that accreditation of organizations and certifications of products both had a place, and that it is important that the value was understood by buyers and vendors.

A couple of days later, I presented with Mary Ann Davidson, CSO of Oracle. The main point of the talk was to try and give the industry perspective on mandates, legislation and regulations – which all seemed to be focused on technology providers – to solve the cyber security issues which we see every day. We agreed that sometimes regulations make sense but having a clear problem definition, language and limited scope was the path to success and acceptance. We also encouraged government to get involved with industry via public/private partnerships, like The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum.

Collaboration is the key to fighting the cyber security battle. If you are interested in hearing more about ways to get involved in building a safer and more productive computing environment, feel free to contact me or leave a comment on this blog. Cybersecurity is a complicated issue and there were well over 20,000 security professionals discussing it at RSA Conference. We’d love to hear your views as well.

Joshua Brickman, PMP (Project Management Professional), runs CA Technologies Federal Certifications Program. He has led CA through the successful evaluation of sixteen products through the Common Criteria over the last six years (in both the U.S. and Canada). He is also a Steering Committee member on The Open Group consortium focused on Supply Chain Integrity and Security, The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF). He also runs CA Technologies Accessibility Program.

The big bang that started The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach was, appropriately, a presentation related to astronomy. Chris Gerty gave a keynote on Big Data at NASA, where he is Deputy Program Manager of the Open Innovation Program. He told us how visualizing deep space and its celestial bodies created understanding and enabled new discoveries. Everyone who attended felt inspired to explore the universe of Big Data during the rest of the conference. And that exploration – as is often the case with successful space missions – left us wondering what lies beyond.

The Big Data Conference Plenary

The second presentation on that Monday morning brought us down from the stars to the nuts and bolts of engineering. Mechanical devices require regular maintenance to keep functioning. Processing the mass of data generated during their operation can improve safety and cut costs. For example, airlines can overhaul aircraft engines when it needs doing, rather than on a fixed schedule that has to be frequent enough to prevent damage under most conditions, but might still fail to anticipate failure in unusual circumstances. David Potter and Ron Schuldt lead two of The Open Group initiatives, Quantum Lifecycle management (QLM) and the Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF). They explained how a semantic approach to product lifecycle management can facilitate the big-data processing needed to achieve this aim.

Chris Gerty was then joined by Andras Szakal, vice-president and chief technology officer at IBM US Federal IMT, Robert Weisman, chief executive officer of Build The Vision, and Jim Hietala, vice-president of Security at The Open Group, in a panel session on Big Data that was moderated by Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions. As always, Dana facilitated a fascinating discussion. Key points made by the panelists included: the trend to monetize data; the need to ensure veracity and usefulness; the need for security and privacy; the expectation that data warehouse technology will exist and evolve in parallel with map/reduce “on-the-fly” analysis; the importance of meaningful presentation of the data; integration with cloud and mobile technology; and the new ways in which Big Data can be used to deliver business value.

More on Big Data

In the afternoons of Monday and Tuesday, and on most of Wednesday, the conference split into streams. These have presentations that are more technical than the plenary, going deeper into their subjects. It’s a pity that you can’t be in all the streams at once. (At one point I couldn’t be in any of them, as there was an important side meeting to discuss the UDEF, which is in one of the areas that I support as forum director). Fortunately, there were a few great stream presentations that I did manage to get to.

On the Monday afternoon, Tom Plunkett and Janet Mostow of Oracle presented a reference architecture that combined Hadoop and NoSQL with traditional RDBMS, streaming, and complex event processing, to enable Big Data analysis. One application that they described was to trace the relations between particular genes and cancer. This could have big benefits in disease prediction and treatment. Another was to predict the movements of protesters at a demonstration through analysis of communications on social media. The police could then concentrate their forces in the right place at the right time.

Jason Bloomberg, president of Zapthink – now part of Dovel – is always thought-provoking. His presentation featured the need for governance vitality to cope with ever changing tools to handle Big Data of ever increasing size, “crowdsourcing” to channel the efforts of many people into solving a problem, and business transformation that is continuous rather than a one-time step from “as is” to “to be.”

Later in the week, I moderated a discussion on Architecting for Big Data in the Cloud. We had a well-balanced panel made up of TJ Virdi of Boeing, Mark Skilton of Capgemini and Tom Plunkett of Oracle. They made some excellent points. Big Data analysis provides business value by enabling better understanding, leading to better decisions. The analysis is often an iterative process, with new questions emerging as answers are found. There is no single application that does this analysis and provides the visualization needed for understanding, but there are a number of products that can be used to assist. The role of the data scientist in formulating the questions and configuring the visualization is critical. Reference models for the technology are emerging but there are as yet no commonly-accepted standards.

The New Enterprise Platform

Jogging is a great way of taking exercise at conferences, and I was able to go for a run most mornings before the meetings started at Newport Beach. Pacific Coast Highway isn’t the most interesting of tracks, but on Tuesday morning I was soon up in Castaways Park, pleasantly jogging through the carefully-nurtured natural coastal vegetation, with views over the ocean and its margin of high-priced homes, slipways, and yachts. I reflected as I ran that we had heard some interesting things about Big Data, but it is now an established topic. There must be something new coming over the horizon.

The answer to what this might be was suggested in the first presentation of that day’s plenary, Mary Ann Mezzapelle, security strategist for HP Enterprise Services, talked about the need to get security right for Big Data and the Cloud. But her scope was actually wider. She spoke of the need to secure the “third platform” – the term coined by IDC to describe the convergence of social, cloud and mobile computing with Big Data.

Securing Big Data

Mary Ann’s keynote was not about the third platform itself, but about what should be done to protect it. The new platform brings with it a new set of security threats, and the increasing scale of operation makes it increasingly important to get the security right. Mary Ann presented a thoughtful analysis founded on a risk-based approach.

She was followed by Adrian Lane, chief technology officer at Securosis, who pointed out that Big Data processing using NoSQL has a different architecture from traditional relational data processing, and requires different security solutions. This does not necessarily mean new techniques; existing techniques can be used in new ways. For example, Kerberos may be used to secure inter-node communications in map/reduce processing. Adrian’s presentation completed the Tuesday plenary sessions.

Service Oriented Architecture

The streams continued after the plenary. I went to the Distributed Services Architecture stream, which focused on SOA.

Bill Poole, enterprise architect at JourneyOne in Australia, described how to use the graphical architecture modeling language ArchiMate® to model service-oriented architectures. He illustrated this using a case study of a global mining organization that wanted to consolidate its two existing bespoke inventory management applications into a single commercial off-the-shelf application. It’s amazing how a real-world case study can make a topic come to life, and the audience certainly responded warmly to Bill’s excellent presentation.

Ali Arsanjani, chief technology officer for Business Performance and Service Optimization, and Heather Kreger, chief technology officer for International Standards, both at IBM, described the range of SOA standards published by The Open Group and available for use by enterprise architects. Ali was one of the brains that developed the SOA Reference Architecture, and Heather is a key player in international standards activities for SOA, where she has helped The Open Group’s Service Integration Maturity Model and SOA Governance Framework to become international standards, and is working on an international standard SOA reference architecture.

Cloud Computing

To start Wednesday’s Cloud Computing streams, TJ Virdi, senior enterprise architect at The Boeing Company, discussed use of TOGAF® to develop an Enterprise Architecture for a Cloud ecosystem. A large enterprise such as Boeing may use many Cloud service providers, enabling collaboration between corporate departments, partners, and regulators in a complex ecosystem. Architecting for this is a major challenge, and The Open Group’s TOGAF for Cloud Ecosystems project is working to provide guidance.

Stuart Boardman of KPN gave a different perspective on Cloud ecosystems, with a case study from the energy industry. An ecosystem may not necessarily be governed by a single entity, and the participants may not always be aware of each other. Energy generation and consumption in the Netherlands is part of a complex international ecosystem involving producers, consumers, transporters, and traders of many kinds. A participant may be involved in several ecosystems in several ways: a farmer for example, might consume energy, have wind turbines to produce it, and also participate in food production and transport ecosystems.

Penelope Gordon of 1-Plug Corporation explained how choice and use of business metrics can impact Cloud service providers. She worked through four examples: a start-up Software-as-a-Service provider requiring investment, an established company thinking of providing its products as cloud services, an IT department planning to offer an in-house private Cloud platform, and a government agency seeking budget for government Cloud.

Mark Skilton, director at Capgemini in the UK, gave a presentation titled “Digital Transformation and the Role of Cloud Computing.” He covered a very broad canvas of business transformation driven by technological change, and illustrated his theme with a case study from the pharmaceutical industry. New technology enables new business models, giving competitive advantage. Increasingly, the introduction of this technology is driven by the business, rather than the IT side of the enterprise, and it has major challenges for both sides. But what new technologies are in question? Mark’s presentation had Cloud in the title, but also featured social and mobile computing, and Big Data.

The New Trend

On Thursday morning I took a longer run, to and round Balboa Island. With only one road in or out, its main street of shops and restaurants is not a through route and the island has the feel of a real village. The SOA Work Group Steering Committee had found an excellent, and reasonably priced, Italian restaurant there the previous evening. There is a clear resurgence of interest in SOA, partly driven by the use of service orientation – the principle, rather than particular protocols – in Cloud Computing and other new technologies. That morning I took the track round the shoreline, and was reminded a little of Dylan Thomas’s “fishing boat bobbing sea.” Fishing here is for leisure rather than livelihood, but I suspected that the fishermen, like those of Thomas’s little Welsh village, spend more time in the bar than on the water.

I thought about how the conference sessions had indicated an emerging trend. This is not a new technology but the combination of four current technologies to create a new platform for enterprise IT: Social, Cloud, and Mobile computing, and Big Data. Mary Ann Mezzapelle’s presentation had referenced IDC’s “third platform.” Other discussions had mentioned Gartner’s “Nexus of forces,” the combination of Social, Cloud and Mobile computing with information that Gartner says is transforming the way people and businesses relate to technology, and will become a key differentiator of business and technology management. Mark Skilton had included these same four technologies in his presentation. Great minds, and analyst corporations, think alike!

I thought also about the examples and case studies in the stream presentations. Areas as diverse as healthcare, manufacturing, energy and policing are using the new technologies. Clearly, they can deliver major business benefits. The challenge for enterprise architects is to maximize those benefits through pragmatic architectures.

Emerging Standards

On the way back to the hotel, I remarked again on what I had noticed before, how beautifully neat and carefully maintained the front gardens bordering the sidewalk are. I almost felt that I was running through a public botanical garden. Is there some ordinance requiring people to keep their gardens tidy, with severe penalties for anyone who leaves a lawn or hedge unclipped? Is a miserable defaulter fitted with a ball and chain, not to be removed until the untidy vegetation has been properly trimmed, with nail clippers? Apparently not. People here keep their gardens tidy because they want to. The best standards are like that: universally followed, without use or threat of sanction.

Standards are an issue for the new enterprise platform. Apart from the underlying standards of the Internet, there really aren’t any. The area isn’t even mapped out. Vendors of Social, Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data products and services are trying to stake out as much valuable real estate as they can. They have no interest yet in boundaries with neatly-clipped hedges.

This is a stage that every new technology goes through. Then, as it matures, the vendors understand that their products and services have much more value when they conform to standards, just as properties have more value in an area where everything is neat and well-maintained.

It may be too soon to define those standards for the new enterprise platform, but it is certainly time to start mapping out the area, to understand its subdivisions and how they inter-relate, and to prepare the way for standards. Following the conference, The Open Group has announced a new Forum, provisionally titled Open Platform 3.0, to do just that.

The SOA and Cloud Work Groups

Thursday was my final day of meetings at the conference. The plenary and streams presentations were done. This day was for working meetings of the SOA and Cloud Work Groups. I also had an informal discussion with Ron Schuldt about a new approach for the UDEF, following up on the earlier UDEF side meeting. The conference hallways, as well as the meeting rooms, often see productive business done.

The SOA Work Group discussed a certification program for SOA professionals, and an update to the SOA Reference Architecture. The Open Group is working with ISO and the IEEE to define a standard SOA reference architecture that will have consensus across all three bodies.

The Cloud Work Group had met earlier to further the TOGAF for Cloud ecosystems project. Now it worked on its forthcoming white paper on business performance metrics. It also – though this was not on the original agenda – discussed Gartner’s Nexus of Forces, and the future role of the Work Group in mapping out the new enterprise platform.

Mapping the New Enterprise Platform

At the start of the conference we looked at how to map the stars. Big Data analytics enables people to visualize the universe in new ways, reach new understandings of what is in it and how it works, and point to new areas for future exploration.

As the conference progressed, we found that Big Data is part of a convergence of forces. Social, mobile, and Cloud Computing are being combined with Big Data to form a new enterprise platform. The development of this platform, and its roll-out to support innovative applications that deliver more business value, is what lies beyond Big Data.

At the end of the conference we were thinking about mapping the new enterprise platform. This will not require sophisticated data processing and analysis. It will take discussions to create a common understanding, and detailed committee work to draft the guidelines and standards. This work will be done by The Open Group’s new Open Platform 3.0 Forum.

The next Open Group conference is in the week of April 15, in Sydney, Australia. I’m told that there’s some great jogging there. More importantly, we’ll be reflecting on progress in mapping Open Platform 3.0, and thinking about what lies ahead. I’m looking forward to it already.

Dr. Chris Harding is Director for Interoperability and SOA at The Open Group. He has been with The Open Group for more than ten years, and is currently responsible for managing and supporting its work on interoperability, including SOA and interoperability aspects of Cloud Computing. He is a member of the BCS, the IEEE and the AEA, and is a certified TOGAF practitioner.